Žibuoklė Martinaitytė: Unexplainable Places
Growing up in Soviet-era Lithuania, where people were often afraid to express their real feelings, Žibuoklė Martinaitytė discovered early on that music was safer than language and that it could enable her to express her innermost feelings without self censoring. It ultimately led her on the path to becoming a composer whose music is performed all over the world. Although Žibuoklė now divides her time between a democratic Lithuania and the United States, her formative experiences have led her to explore a sonic vocabulary, which though frequently inspired by nature and always deeply emotive, is completely abstract and open to multiple interpretations.
“Music is enough; not only enough, it’s more than enough,” she explained to me during a Zoom conversation last month. “It surpasses words; it surpasses the meaning of words because it can go to unknown places and unexplainable places. The beauty of music is that if you are telling some story, some inner story that you don’t want to reveal the details of, you could still tell the story and the listener would relate to that story. … [T]hey create their own story in their minds because nobody’s telling them what to think. But they have the emotional components that come up, like physiological and psychological reactions to the sounds that they hear.”
This approach to narrative is an ideal modus operandi when creating an orchestral composition or a piece of chamber music, and Žibuoklė has made significant contributions to both of these idioms which have resonated with audiences both in the concert hall and on recordings. Horizons, a 2013 symphonic tour-de-force, has been performed in multiple cities and has been recorded twice. Starkland’s recording of her enhanced piano trio In Search of Lost Beauty was described by Richard Whitehouse in Gramophone magazine as “one of the most significant releases thus far” on that label, praising her music’s “potency.” Last season, soon after the Finnish label Ondine released the Lithuanian National Symphony Orchestra’s recording of her haunting 2019 Saudade, a work inspired by the death of her father as well as her immigration to the USA, the work received a performance by the New York Philharmonic causing Zachary Woolfe in The New York Times to describe her orchestral writing as “intriguingly agitated.” Bang on a Can’s record label Cantaloupe Music recently released her 2020-21 Hadal Zone, an immersive sonic experience for a quintet of low-ranged instruments and electronics evoking the bottom of the ocean. But how does this play out when composing vocal music?
In our talk, Žibuoklė described her reticence to use words when she first received a commission to write a work for the choir Jauna Muzika in 2010 from the annual Gaida Festival, the most prominent new music festival in Lithuania. After feeling more drawn to the vowels of words in certain texts than the actual words, she ultimately decided to eschew text and set only vowels.
“When I made that choice of not using language, I felt, once again, very liberated,” she admitted, which makes perfect sense considering her life’s experiences. “Music was the way to have that freedom and music was the way to express myself in an absolutely free way and nobody could stop me from that. … That sense of freedom, I think, stayed with me to this day. That’s why music is so precious to me. And that’s why I don’t want to use narratives and text because I feel they would put me into some kind of perceptional prison.”
That first choral work, The Blue of Distance, which was subsequently performed and recorded by the San Francisco-based choir Volti, has led to two others thus far: Chant des Voyelles, which was commissioned by Volti in 2018, and Aletheia, a 2022 work created in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine which was premiered by the Latvian Radio Choir during last year’s edition of the Baltic Music Days. All of these pieces were without words although that does not prevent her from conveying a visceral narrative, as she acknowledged in describing Aletheia. “I was thinking … about voice being the first and the very last instrument that we might have in our lives and all those people in the war, how they still have their voices with them and they could express themselves in this rage or scream, even as they are being killed.”
However, Žibuoklė confessed that the piece she is working on right now, a half-hour song cycle for female voice and orchestra, will actually have words. “Yes, I know, it’s quite unusual for me, but I must say I’m enjoying working with it, although I have mixed feelings about how I feel about text. But I will insert some vowel singing without text because I can’t go without it. But it’s this text by this very, very old female poet from more than 4,000 years ago called Enheduanna. … It’s fascinating how the poetry that was composed such a long time ago still contains the same subject matters that are very much today’s topics, like war and migration of people and environmental concerns and catastrophes and gender bending identities. It’s just incredible how all the issues remain the same over and over.”
From that silence that I hear in the world then comes the inner experience which resonates with that. You have to calm down in order to even perceive those sounds, because if you are too turbulent inside, if there's a lot of agitation or a lot of thought processes that are happening, it's very hard to hear anything, because all you hear are your own thoughts.
Žibuoklė Martinaitytė
I was composing my own melodies and then telling stories about how I saw the world. At some point, all those words disappeared. I don't know why. Then only music remained, and I didn't need a text, I didn't need lyrics anymore. I thought that music is enough; not only enough, it's more than enough. It surpasses words; it surpasses the meaning of words because it can go to unknown places and unexplainable places.
Žibuoklė Martinaitytė
The beauty of music is that if you are telling some story, some inner story that you don't want to reveal the details of, you could still tell the story and the listener would relate to that story. But they relate in their own way and in a way they create their own story in their minds because nobody's telling them what to think.
Žibuoklė Martinaitytė
How many stories we can tell in like 10 minutes or 20 minutes--the density of material becomes the flow of time. So if we give a lot of material, then the time kind of quickens, and the perception becomes that we experience a lot of things. Maybe some of them don't make sense. If we give a lesser amount of stories, maybe it's just one line, or one narrative, then the time can slow down...
Žibuoklė Martinaitytė
I must say I'm very curious how long pieces are. So when I hear something at the concert before the beginning of the piece, I look at the watch because I want to know how long the piece was, because I want to know if my inner perception of that piece was accurate.
Žibuoklė Martinaitytė
My inner compass is directed at that experience of erasing time, of erasing self, erasing all the limits that we have of time and space and dimension. But do I achieve it? Sometimes I think I do, but not for long.
Žibuoklė Martinaitytė
No court in the world will say this music is about destruction or some horrible things or something that wasn't allowed by the Soviet mentality and regime. In a way, music was a safe place, the safest place, because in everyday life, we had to think what to say, what not to say when you are talking to somebody and there was always this editing that was happening in the mind and editing of information.
Žibuoklė Martinaitytė
That concept of freedom was so crucial in my mind as I was growing up and I knew that I will never give away that freedom that I create for myself. So music was the way to have that freedom and music was the way to express myself in an absolutely free way and nobody could stop me from that.
Žibuoklė Martinaitytė
Music is so precious to me. And that's why I don't want to use narratives and text because I feel they would put me into some kind of perceptional prison.
Žibuoklė Martinaitytė
You mentioned Ustvolskaya and that ability to compose whatever you want. It didn't mean that people would be playing your music or the music would be performed. But what was important was that you were able to do it, just to prove to yourself that you have the agency, you have the independence, and you can do whatever you want, at least on paper. And if nobody sees it, if nobody hears that, that's okay, because that's a second step.
Žibuoklė Martinaitytė
When I started composing I wasn't so eager that people would start playing my music right away because I wanted to keep it for myself for a very long time. And then at some point, I felt ready to give it to the world. I felt ready to give it to others because I had to know myself first.
Žibuoklė Martinaitytė
When I got a choral commission, I was thinking I need a text because that's what everybody does, right? I was looking at multiple texts in English, in Lithuanian, then I thought maybe in Latin. I started writing down the excerpts that resonated with me. Then I was thinking how to put it into music and I started thinking, "What if I could use only vowels of sounds, but not entire words?" I wrote down vowels from the excerpt that I liked. And then I was thinking: So why am I doing this? I could just use vowels or syllables, whatever I want. Why do I have to extract them from the existing text and then say, "Oh, the basis of this piece is this text, but I'm using only parts of the words that are vowel-based."
Žibuoklė Martinaitytė
I was thinking also about voice being the first and the very last instrument that we might have in our lives and all those people in the war, how they still have their voices with them and they could express themselves in this rage or scream, even as they are being killed.
Žibuoklė Martinaitytė
Being a musician and composer, I must say I prefer music without visuals ... If there's an additional video component or some kind of visual component, sometimes I just want to close my eyes and listen to the music.
Žibuoklė Martinaitytė
Because I am in New York, I become a little bit exotic also to Lithuanians, because I live elsewhere, right? And then because I am from elsewhere, I am exotic to the American audiences. It allows me to be of both places, but at the same time of neither. ... Maybe I do have the best of both worlds. But in other ways I don't because wherever I go, I still don't feel like I'm just in that place...
Žibuoklė Martinaitytė
Somehow that difficult time for everybody became unbelievably successful for me. And I don't know what the recipe of it was. But I think maybe because there was no outer life happening, I was able to really focus my mind on a single thing and that single thing was music.
Žibuoklė Martinaitytė
After the pandemic, we all want to experience life in a kind of catch up and to have more experiences faster than we are used to. So the slowness of time is less appealing right now to us as it would have been maybe before the pandemic.
Žibuoklė Martinaitytė
It's rather through the experience than through words or through direct messages and saying do something about it. But yes, of course, do something about it would be the message.
Žibuoklė Martinaitytė
It's fascinating how the poetry that was composed such a long time ago still contains the same subject matters that are very much today's topics, like war and migration of people and environmental concerns and catastrophes and gender bending identities. It's just incredible how all the issues remain the same over and over.
Žibuoklė Martinaitytė
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Žibuoklė Martinaitytė. (Photo by Tomas Terekas)
Žibuoklė Martinaitytė: Unexplainable Places
A conversation with Frank J. Oteri
Transcribed by Michelle HrominFrank J. Oteri: Your music seems to take inspiration from two very different sources, two very different ideas, which are seemingly opposite, but maybe they’re not. One is phenomena in the natural world, and the other is the inner workings of the mind. I’m curious if you think of these as opposites, or if you think of them as related, and how and why are those the two things that keep coming back in so many of your pieces?
Žibuoklė Martinaitytė: Well, for me, they are not separated, they are complementary. But yes, you are right to say that one could perceive it as two different sources of inspiration. Let’s take both of them separately, those two worlds. Let’s start from the outer world, the outer circle, and then go in a little bit, maybe that will be a logical direction, although if we think of the conversation as a composition, as a music composition, we could go either way. We could start from the very essence of the thing, you know, like when we start a musical piece, sometimes the beginning is the very essence, the main idea of the piece that everything builds up from that very little cell. But sometimes it starts as an atmospheric thing. So let’s start with this textural atmospheric thing, which is inspiration coming from nature. Nature is a very important part of my identity because every summer I spent in Lithuania since my childhood here in the forest and near the lake. I always kind of attune myself to the silence of the natural world and then start hearing things which are very subtle, like a little bit of wind somewhere on the top of the trees. Then you start hearing and distinguishing how every tree has its individual sound, which is pretty amazing, right? Considering that in a city we don’t differentiate sound so well. When I’m in the nature, then I start hearing a lot of subtleties of sound and silence too, let’s not call it sound, it’s more of the natural silence, which contains all those nuanced little sounds. The longer I stay in nature, the more I start hearing all those subtleties and the variety of sounds. For me, they are the biggest inspiration because then on a fifth or sixth day, I start hearing harmonies in the wind and everywhere whereas the first day or second day when I arrive, I don’t hear much. I really only kind of try to relax and try to create my inner noise that creates a contrast to that silence of the natural world. From that silence that I hear in the world then comes the inner experience which resonates with that. You have to calm down in order to even perceive those sounds, because if you are too turbulent inside, if there’s a lot of agitation or a lot of thought processes that are happening, it’s very hard to hear anything, because all you hear are your own thoughts. That’s where those worlds start to coincide, the inner and outer, because you have to be in certain synchrony with one another, otherwise there’s no experience or the experience is not very full.
FJO: It’s interesting that your music tells stories of these outer and inner landscapes and of course, when you talk about storytelling, people automatically think of language. But you express these ideas through music, which is, and maybe you could debate this as well, a much less precise way to convey meanings, definitely to a listener, although you could also argue that through the realm of notated music, you’re trying to achieve specific sounds that are conveyed to musicians who then play the work. Of course, those are open to interpretation as well. So music becomes very indirect. I’m curious how music became the medium for you to express these ideas.
ZM: Well, music was my first tool of expression, ever since I started talking or making sounds. Apparently, I was singing a lot, and I was singing about everything that I’ve heard, that I’ve perceived. So I imagine for my parents it was a little bit like watching a musical theater play or something like that, because I was composing my own melodies and then telling stories about how I saw the world. At some point, all those words disappeared. I don’t know why. Then only music remained, and I didn’t need a text, I didn’t need lyrics anymore. I thought that music is enough; not only enough, it’s more than enough. It surpasses words; it surpasses the meaning of words because it can go to unknown places and unexplainable places. The beauty of music is that if you are telling some story, some inner story that you don’t want to reveal the details of, you could still tell the story and the listener would relate to that story. But they relate in their own way and in a way they create their own story in their minds because nobody’s telling them what to think. But they have the emotional components that come up, like physiological and psychological reactions to the sounds that they hear. In a way, it’s tricking the listener into much more freedom than they’re allowed if they are having to deal with the music with text or with some particular narrative or story that they have to follow. I like that approach for now, but I don’t know, maybe eventually I will start using text because even now, as we are talking, I’m composing a piece with text for the first time after a very, very long time.
FJO: I want to definitely hear more about that, but I’d love to begin talking about this orchestral piece Horizons from 10 years ago, which I feel was a defining moment for you as a composer. It’s interesting to me that it is about telling a story that’s non narrative. It’s supposed to have listeners get lost in the directionality of it.
ZM: I was relying on the listener’s brain and perceptions that they will string together those elements that I throw at them at random times, and they will still make parallel narratives that develop simultaneously. I wanted to see whether it would make sense to the listeners, too, so in a way it was an experiment for my own sake. But then people liked it, and they were able to relate to it somehow, so I understood that they managed to do that task that I assigned to them without them knowing that they will have to do it. How many stories we can tell in like 10 minutes or 20 minutes–the density of material becomes the flow of time. So if we give a lot of material, then the time kind of quickens, and the perception becomes that we experience a lot of things. Maybe some of them don’t make sense. If we give a lesser amount of stories, maybe it’s just one line, or one narrative, then the time can slow down and so on. So that was what this piece was about.
FJO: I always like to say to people that music exists in time, but when music is successful it completely changes people’s perception of time. If you’re paying attention to the clock, then somehow the music is not working.
ZM: I agree with that. Although, as a composer, I must say I’m very curious how long pieces are. So when I hear something at the concert before the beginning of the piece, I look at the watch because I want to know how long the piece was, because I want to know if my inner perception of that piece was accurate. Of course, the best pieces, the mind blowing works that we hear, they erase any sense of time and we go beyond time, beyond self. Those wonderful pieces, like John Luther Adams’s Become Ocean, for instance, one of those examples where time just completely disappeared, and then nothing is left. You are not all alone, but you are erased too, because you exist only in time somehow. I want that experience for my listeners, too, and I want people to have that even if it’s maybe not for the entire duration of the piece, but maybe it’s a short moment. My inner compass is directed at that experience of erasing time, of erasing self, erasing all the limits that we have of time and space and dimension. But do I achieve it? Sometimes I think I do, but not for long.
FJO: It definitely goes both ways, the five-minute piece that feels like it’s an hour. That could be a bad thing, but it can also be a good thing if you cram so much in five minutes. Or the half an hour piece that feels like it raced by.
ZM: Some listeners and performers of my music also have told me that they’ve had that experience playing my longer pieces, like the ones that last for an hour. Listeners come to me and they say, “Oh, it could have lasted five hours, I wouldn’t have minded at all.” Or players said, “It just went like 10 or 15 minutes and then, but it was 68 minutes. How come? What happened?”
FJO: Wow. I want to go back to something that you said at the onset without giving away secrets. You said that you like this idea that you can tell stories through music without having to tell the whole story; there are parts that you can keep to yourself, that you don’t have to give away every detail, and that listeners can form their own stories, and that’s part of why it’s exciting. This gets to the whole notion that the precision of language can be very problematic. On a personal note, you grew up in a very pivotal time in world history, in a very pivotal place. You grew up in Lithuania while Lithuania was still part of the Soviet Union, unwillingly, and you were a teenager when Lithuania was the first of the Soviet republics to declare its independence, which ultimately led to the erosion of the Soviet Union. In the Soviet era, people couldn’t speak their minds and tell people exactly how they felt. There were fears of getting in trouble with authorities. Curiously, you were actually born in St. Petersburg; you were born in Russia. You grew up in Lithuania, so from your earliest childhood, you were bilingual; you had these two languages. Even the precision that we think of as language, maybe it’s a little less precise when there are two different languages to choose from. I’m just wondering, in terms of your formative years growing up, in terms of what language is and the precision of language, if that had any impact on your desire to make music that’s more amorphous from a narrative, syntactical point of view.
ZM: Perhaps so, because even without understanding it in a way that you just described, which is true, what you said, I think all those things played their role. Even the choice of music as a medium, because it’s so abstract. And so you could hide any meaning that you want within the music and nobody can accuse you of having said something wrong if there are no words, right? No court in the world will say this music is about destruction or some horrible things or something that wasn’t allowed by the Soviet mentality and regime. In a way, music was a safe place, the safest place, because in everyday life, we had to think what to say, what not to say when you are talking to somebody and there was always this editing that was happening in the mind and editing of information. But then when you were dealing with both languages, it was becoming a quite challenging inner game that you had to play because not all the concepts, culturally speaking, were translating well from Russian to Lithuanian and vice versa. And, as I said, a lot of things were not allowed to be said, and you couldn’t express yourself freely. All we wanted, everybody who lived in those times, we had an immense longing for freedom, that was the only thing that we wanted. That was the highest goal of everybody–an inner freedom mostly. Of course, outer freedom, too–like freedom to travel, freedom to say what you want. That concept of freedom was so crucial in my mind as I was growing up and I knew that I will never give away that freedom that I create for myself. So music was the way to have that freedom and music was the way to express myself in an absolutely free way and nobody could stop me from that. When I discovered that I could do that, that I have ability to create and when I discovered that, that kind of a feeling of free fall almost when I was writing my first notes, I was like, “This is unbelievable. I can’t even understand that this feeling can exist within me, this absolute limitlessness and all the possibilities where everything can exist on paper.” Of course, not everything can exist in reality because there are limitations of instruments and ranges and what people can do and all those technical limitations. But, at that point when I started, I wasn’t aware of that so I was like, I can do anything. And that sense of freedom, I think, stayed with me to this day. That’s why music is so precious to me. And that’s why I don’t want to use narratives and text because I feel they would put me into some kind of perceptional prison.
FJO: I want to counter a little bit what you’re saying, that music was this one place where you could do what you want. Clearly by the time of the 80s, the time of Glasnost and Perestroika where things had opened up a bit, but obviously it was very different for somebody like Shostakovich or Ustvolskaya, who wrote these amazing pieces in the late ’40s, early ’50s that were basically in the drawer and couldn’t be performed. No one could do them until the ’70s because they were not reflecting socialist realism, the aesthetic that Stalin imposed. Shostakovich got around it in very sneaky, tricky ways by saying, “My piece isn’t about this; it’s about that.” And he was able to get away with it, but some people weren’t. It’s interesting because you look at Lithuania and Lithuanian music. I think it’s very different from a lot of other places; a lot of it’s really avant-garde. It’s really wild and was wild before becoming an independent country in its own right from the Soviet Union. But it’s wild in a different way than say the modernism of Western and Central Europe, which really got codified into a system that, in a way, maybe became a different kind of sonic prison. I feel there’s a freedom in Lithuanian music, and I think of a composer like Bronius Kutavičius, whom you studied with, who is this towering figure of really experimental, extraordinary music. The closest thing to it, I think, and here’s where my Americanness comes out, is the American experimental tradition, the whole downtown avant-garde; it’s more closely aligned to that. The non-conformist individualistic music that happened in various pockets in the U.S.A. in the ’50s and ’60s, but it seemed to have happened independently in Lithuania, which I find fascinating.
ZM: Somehow it was allowed because, as you said, it wasn’t this radical modernism that would be really going against that Soviet realism aesthetic. And because it was also stemming from the ancient Lithuanian music, so maybe that’s why it was legitimate. But of course, people like Kutavičius, who were composing that music, they didn’t have the luxuries and all the privileges of the composers that were conforming to the regime. He wasn’t allowed to teach at the academy. He didn’t have an apartment given [to him] by the regime and so on. So there was a downside to it. But he was able to compose whatever he wanted to. You mentioned Ustvolskaya and that ability to compose whatever you want. It didn’t mean that people would be playing your music or the music would be performed. But what was important was that you were able to do it, just to prove to yourself that you have the agency, you have the independence, and you can do whatever you want, at least on paper. And if nobody sees it, if nobody hears that, that’s okay, because that’s a second step. Probably that’s why when I started composing I wasn’t so eager that people would start playing my music right away because I wanted to keep it for myself for a very long time. And then at some point, I felt ready to give it to the world. I felt ready to give it to others because I had to know myself first. Through the process of writing, I was understanding my own inner workings of my mind and what I am expressing and how it all works, kind of making sense of the world in a way. Everybody’s discovering the world and trying to perceive how things are through books, through philosophy, but also through art, through your own art form. You are seeing something and then when you see what you’ve written, you understand how you felt or what you felt. But before you wrote it, you didn’t know it, as though it didn’t even exist in you. So that is the mystery that I find fascinating over and over again. When I write something, then I start perceiving all the things that were hidden inside me or all the layers of perception that were there. On the surface of consciousness, everything seems quite simple. But then, when you look into the music, all of a sudden, you’re like, what is this? Where does this come from? So it’s always a process of discovery and surprise every time.
Žibuoklė Martinaitytė (Photo by Tomas Terekas)
FJO: In talking about language and avoiding language, avoiding text, I immediately thought of the extraordinary piece that you wrote called The Blue of Distance, which doesn’t use language. The singers become instruments. Despite there being some really great music for chorus that avoids language this way, I immediately think of Meredith Monk, most composers, when they get an assignment to write for chorus, are still going to set a preexisting text. That’s kind of what you do. A lot of choruses are very tied to language and that’s how they can remember the music they’re singing–through the words that the music is setting.
ZM: Of course, when I got a choral commission, I was thinking I need a text because that’s what everybody does, right? I was looking at multiple texts in English, in Lithuanian, then I thought maybe in Latin. I started writing down the excerpts that resonated with me. Then I was thinking how to put it into music and I started thinking, “What if I could use only vowels of sounds, but not entire words?” I wrote down vowels from the excerpt that I liked. And then I was thinking: So why am I doing this? I could just use vowels or syllables, whatever I want. Why do I have to extract them from the existing text and then say, “Oh, the basis of this piece is this text, but I’m using only parts of the words that are vowel-based.” So the piece, The Blue of Distance, was inspired by Rebecca Solnit, by her book. She had those chapters in the book that were called “The Blue of Distance.” There was a description of the distances and how things look blue in the distance, although they are not, how blue is the color of the distance itself, but not of the object that we are seeing. All those things poetically stimulated me and I thought it’s perfect for my music and I can have those near and far dichotomies in the phonic relationship of the sound. When I made that choice of not using language, I felt, once again, very liberated. I could make any sounds and the choristers could make any sounds. Of course, voices start sounding like instruments when you use them without text because they are singing something, but they are not saying anything while they are singing. I found it that it helps the listeners, too, because as a listener of choral music or vocal music, you are always trying to catch the text and part of your awareness goes to that catching of the text, like I need to catch every word or every other word so that the meaning would be clear. And sometimes that task takes so much energy that you forget to even follow the musical narrative or musical line because you are so involved, especially if the text is not audible very clearly, like it is in some concert halls because of the acoustics. So it becomes this preoccupation that is quite stressful. When there’s no text, you could listen to the music. I remember listeners in San Francisco coming to me after the concerts and thanking me for letting them rest in the music without needing to follow the words. And they said they never thought that it would be so freeing and so enjoyable and pleasurable; they said, “Finally, we could listen to the music!” I didn’t expect a reaction like this. I thought maybe some people would even be upset that they don’t know what those singers are singing about. But somehow the emotion was clear. I wrote three choral pieces that are all without words and the last one was written last year, Aletheia. It was about inexpressible things that we feel when this war in Ukraine started and all those emotions that were inside me because I was so close to the issue. All those violent feelings that you want to scream about. I was thinking also about voice being the first and the very last instrument that we might have in our lives and all those people in the war, how they still have their voices with them and they could express themselves in this rage or scream, even as they are being killed. All those things were running through my head while I was composing the last choral work without words and I think that emotion came through quite directly and the listeners could understand what was happening.
FJO: Is there a plan to record that piece? Is that going to be something that everyone can hear at some point?
ZM: Yes. for sure.
FJO: When we first met each other in Vilnius 18 years ago, you handed me a CDR of some of your compositions. I still remember this duo for tuba and piano, which was really unusual.
ZM: It’s the earliest piece that I have a recording of. Though there are lots of pieces that I wrote as a student and afterwards. I don’t know how to think of those pieces, maybe as part of a learning process. Somehow with this tuba piece, I already felt like I’m ready to go to the world and present myself. The very first piece I wrote was in, I don’t even remember when now. But I was writing in the ’90s already, so quite long ago.
FJO: So if someone were to want to do one of those early pieces?
ZM: No, no, no, no, no, no. Usually, when people ask me, when they look into my catalog and they say, “Oh, you have a piece for my instrument that you wrote in 1993 or 1992, can I get the score?” And I say, “No, it’s not available. It’s in my archive; it’s in a handwritten manuscript, but it’s not available for performances.” Because I want to keep it as a part of the history, but I don’t think it needs to be audible for others. Maybe one day. But this tuba piece, the story was that there was a very persistent tuba player in Lithuania [Sergijus Kirsenka] who just finished his studies in Sweden and learned all those extended techniques for the instrument and there was not much repertoire of Lithuanian composers that he could play. So he was very, very persistent, asking every composer that he met almost to write him a piece and he was also finding a way to premiere those pieces, to record those pieces, and to present them at festivals. This piece, by the way, was played in Ukraine many times because of the connections that this player had with Ukraine, because he has some Ukrainian blood, a little bit of the heritage. So that’s how it all started. He wanted to play either with electronics or with piano because he didn’t want to just be alone on a stage so then I thought maybe piano would be relevant. And then later on, I wrote a piece for him with electronics so that he could have that, too.
FJO: Nice. Is he still around performing new music?
ZM: Yes, and that very piece, within one year he performed it 50 or more times. Everywhere. At various concerts, educational opportunities, at schools, and in hospitals. That piece was really going around and around because he felt very much connected to that piece because I wrote it for him and he was part of the creative process, too, because he was showing me what’s possible on that instrument. I was using only the things that I liked the sound of, that seemed relevant to my inner expression. That’s why tuba starts in the highest register. It’s the beginning of the piece. It’s the lowest brass instrument and starts in its highest register, which is confusing for everybody. So once again, it’s a play with perceptions. You take this notion that there’s this huge brass instrument that comes onto the stage and has to produce this low, vibrant sound that fills the hall and all of a sudden it’s just a scream from afar rather than the sound of the instrument itself.
FJO: As long as we’re talking about the visual aspects of music, I feel like we have to touch on In Search of Lost Beauty, which is a really extraordinary piece. I know it mostly through the recording on Starkland, this wonderful boutique new music label based out of Colorado. It’s this very, very beautiful work for piano trio and fixed media electronics, but also images. On the recording, there are images produced in the booklet and on the cover. Otherwise, it’s just an audio recording, but I know that the visual components are a very important part of the piece. It obviously works as just audio, but I’m curious for you, how the visual elements inspire you.
ZM: Yes. Visuals are important, but not in a direct way. I’m thinking about what people are seeing while they are hearing the sound, but I’m not sure if I always want to have some visuals to accompany the music. But in that particular project that you mentioned, in Search of Lost Beauty, I wanted to see if I could achieve some kind of interesting conversation between visuals and the music. And because I was making the visuals myself, I also wanted to try it out and see how I manage to be creative, even if it’s a very ephemeral video. It doesn’t have much narrative; it’s mostly filmed with iPhone and it’s very subjective. It’s not necessarily in a direct conversation with music. But because it’s done through the same mind who created music and visuals, there is some kind of polyphony that is happening, but I don’t know. I’m not quite sure. That’s why I was able to release it as a CD, because I wanted to see if the piece stands on its own without visuals. And I think it did pass the test because a lot of people could relate to that too. Being a musician and composer, I must say I prefer music without visuals, if I will be completely honest with you. I don’t mean those visuals on the stage where the real performers are playing; it’s always fascinating to watch how the sound is being produced, what instruments are playing, how performers are behaving. That’s very fascinating. That’s like a theater. That’s enough. But if there’s an additional video component or some kind of visual component, sometimes I just want to close my eyes and listen to the music. But it’s perhaps because I’m so audio oriented, not visually oriented. In that piece, once again, I wanted to try out some new territory. A lot of people who were close to me were saying, “Don’t do it; don’t go into that realm of visuals because it’s a dangerous territory, especially if you don’t have any experience.” And then I talked to a filmmaker, one of the filmmakers who is my friend and I said, “What do you think?” And she said, “You know what? If you have the idea of how those visuals would be, make it happen just for yourself to see how you solve that visual problem and it will be an interesting way to see if your music needs visuals. Maybe it doesn’t at all, or maybe it does. Maybe you will find some new way of expressing yourself.” So I was brave enough to try it out, to try that new territory. But of course those visuals are lacking a professional hand. Maybe one day I would love to see that piece envisioned by some filmmaker or a visual artist who would make an additional installation to that piece and then to see how that would enrich the piece or maybe create some new dimension of perception.
FJO: Another thing that strikes me about that piece that I find fascinating about it is that it incorporates two pieces that you had previously composed, Inhabited Silences and Serenity Diptychs, which is a piece I treasured from the very first recording of your music that was put out by the Lithuanian Music Information Centre. I know that in recent years you’ve been interested in developing much longer forms and longer works. I’m curious how those two pieces to be together with many other movements as well into this much larger structure.
ZM: It happened very organically somehow. I was sitting in my studio one day after I wrote those pieces that you mentioned and then I was thinking about some larger form, like an hour-long form, and then I had this fear that I won’t manage to write that long piece of music that would be engaging enough. And then I thought, “Why don’t I start with integrating something that I already have as a point of reference? Just a starting point. Maybe later on, I will remove that starting point and will go away from that. Then I thought, “Okay, let’s have it as a structural element and then build up a bigger piece based on that. And then, if needed, I can replace it with yet another segment.” After I composed everything, I was thinking, “Well, it fits perfectly because I wanted to make all those harmonic decisions and structural decisions based on those preexisting pieces. Then, of course, it fit perfectly with this new material. Then I thought, “Why not? Because once we place something in a different context, it becomes a new thing. So what that we have heard it before. When it becomes a part of something larger, it acquires a new set of meanings, because it has more relationships that I developed through the other movements of the pieces.
FJO: It’s really interesting to me that your music has gotten further out into the world since you relocated to the United States. But in a way that’s sort of a simplistic way to look at it because you’re in Lithuania right now, so it isn’t that you moved away from Lithuania, but you added other places to the places where you spend time. There’s been this deep connection. The first recording was issued by the Lithuanian Music Information Centre, which is an incredible organization. They’ve been extremely supportive of your work and the Lithuanian music community has been extremely supportive of your work. But that second recording was released By Starkland, which is an American label. The new recording that just came out was put out by Bang on a Can’s label Cantaloupe; once again, an American label. So there’s been this very strong connection with the United States. Then one of your orchestra pieces that was on an Ondine recording [Saudade], a Finnish label, was performed by the New York Philharmonic. In a way, it’s the best of both worlds. You’re a Lithuanian composer in America, which makes you sort of more exotic to Americans, but it also makes you more reachable because you’re here in the United States part of the time.
ZM: Yes, it’s funny how it works, but it works exactly as you described. Because I am in New York, I become a little bit exotic also to Lithuanians, because I live elsewhere, right? And then because I am from elsewhere, I am exotic to the American audiences. It allows me to be of both places, but at the same time of neither. Having an identity of otherness creates mystery. The mystery, of course, can be solved if you start to know that other identity. In my case, I think it might be just a leitmotif of my life because, as you mentioned, I was born in Russia, but at home we were speaking Lithuanian. So I had those two identities already since birth. I always carried them. When we moved to Lithuania, then I also had this identity of that other place far away that I knew about, but other people didn’t. So I always felt like I have something else. Then later on when I met my husband, who’s American, that became yet another transformation into those dual identities somehow. Also I think when we moved to the United States, I started to understand myself a little bit better, what my music is. And I started seeing my own identity with more clarity. When you are in a native context, a native environment, and everybody’s writing similar music or a similar harmonic language, it’s very hard to see anything that distinguishes you from that native environment. I really feel my relationship to the environment changed because the context is new. All of a sudden you start seeing your own delineations very clearly. You start seeing who you are. Not as a person so much; I’m talking mostly about music. I started to feel like my harmonic language is distinctly different from most of the American composers because it has this genetic code of Lithuanian folk melodies, of all the lullabies that occurred in childhood and so on. Maybe I do have the best of both worlds. But in other ways I don’t because wherever I go, I still don’t feel like I’m just in that place because I have two languages running in my head all the time. When I speak to my husband or speak to my friends in the United States, I’m using English. And then obviously in my diaries or in my other communications, I speak Lithuanian. I write music on paper, not on computer. I still write in a very old fashioned way, then later on, I, of course, put it on the computer. But my sketches and my manuscripts contain both languages. So it’s a nightmare for any archivist who would look at those because some remarks are in English, half of them Lithuanian. Some words are in English, some in Lithuanian. It’s such a big chaotic mess. When I look at my sketches from five years ago, I can’t even understand myself how it connects, but in a moment of composing that particular piece, everything makes sense, of course, and all those languages and everything is clear.
Žibuoklė Martinaitytė (Photo by Tomas Terekas)
FJO: We talked about how in the last decade, you’ve really come into your own as a composer since being in the United States at least part of the time. I want to take it further and say I felt like you’ve really hit a stride in the last three years, even more so, since this very bizarre time we’ve all been in, these pandemic times where suddenly the whole notion of place has become completely uprooted. For the first of those years, we were all imprisoned in our homes, so it didn’t matter where you were, you were kind of in your own prison, wherever that was, of your own mind. As a result of it, the new ways we’ve found to communicate with each other–here we are, having this conversation over Zoom. You’re in Lithuania; I’m in New York. It doesn’t matter where you are to some extent. It was already not mattering to some extent, but I think that got accelerated with the pandemic. Certainly for you as a creator and the kinds of ideas that your music takes, in a way, the pandemic has become this really interesting sort of Ur narrative of some of the recent pieces, these pieces that are about time standing still, not moving, because this is something that we all felt in this shared moment that the whole world had. So I’m curious about how those pieces evolved and I’m also curious–I’d love to know the story of that first recording on Ondine. It’s kind of a miracle that it even happened because it was recorded during the height of the pandemic with a full orchestra.
ZM: Yes, it was a strike of luck, really, that it happened, because that recording that you mentioned, it was planned a long time ago, and then when the pandemic came, we were not sure whether we would be able to have an orchestra in a concert hall and to record together. It was all a really very magical time. Because in Europe, the pandemic was not so bad in some places. Well, it was bad in Italy and other places, but in Lithuania, because it’s a relatively small country, it didn’t hit very hard. So people were very careful. Still, we had windows of time where the regulations were less strict. Somehow we managed to get that recording done within that very narrow window of opportunity. And the next day after the recording, the masks were mandatory again; everything was back to that place, and we wouldn’t have been able to do it. But because of that recording and also because of the timing of the pandemic, I came to Lithuania for a very short visit. I had to be here for 10 days or something like that. And because everything closed down, all the borders, I couldn’t return to the States because there were no flights anymore. So I stayed in Lithuania for almost six months through the pandemic. Of course, my motivation to stay was because of that recording, which was planned, because I knew that if I left the country, even if I found a way to leave the country, I wouldn’t be able to come back because no one was allowed to come in anymore. And because it was an orchestral recording, it was such an opportunity that I knew that I cannot miss it and I cannot just let it go. Somehow that difficult time for everybody became unbelievably successful for me. And I don’t know what the recipe of it was. But I think maybe because there was no outer life happening, I was able to really focus my mind on a single thing and that single thing was music. Not only on composing, but also, I was thinking: what are the most essential things for me in life? If I am to survive another day or two or a week or a year, what are my priorities? And I knew that deep down my first and only priority was music and I put my mind onto that as being my guiding light. And that guiding light led me through the pandemic and led into very beautiful places of creativity, of self-discovery, and also a lot of opportunities have opened up somehow for me. I even had performances of my pieces in empty concert halls where I was the only listener and somehow it all happened, I don’t know how, because many of my colleagues, composers in Lithuania or in United States, they didn’t have performances and I kept having performances almost for the entire pandemic. Don’t ask me how that happened, because I didn’t plan it; it was just happening on its own.
FJO: Wow, and two pieces that you wrote during the pandemic were recorded on a second Ondine Recording. There wasn’t just one recording, there was a follow up the year later. And those two pieces, Ex Tenebris Lux and Nunc fluens. Nunc stans., both titled in Latin, really are attempts to deal with the pandemic in sound and to deal with this weird stasis that we all felt, this whole sense that time isn’t moving anymore. But of course, time is always moving. And, in a performance, it’s always going from beginning to end, but somehow listening to this music, you get lost in this timeless vortex, which is really fascinating as a listener.
ZM: Yeah, it was a music that was reflective of the time that we lived in. I think it was fitting in that time, and as a memory of that time it’s very important. And yes, it does have this stillness of time within those two pieces that you mentioned, but especially with Ex Tenebris Lux, because it’s a longer piece, it’s like 24 minutes or so. It’s really, really slow, the development of that transformation from darkness to light, from lower register to the full spectrum of sound to the full spectrum of harmonics and overtones and the full blooming of the sound. That transformation is so slow that when I was listening to that piece, I think a year ago in a concert hall, I was thinking, this is almost impossibly slow for myself as a listener. Because, you know, after the pandemic, we all want to experience life in a kind of catch up and to have more experiences faster than we are used to. So the slowness of time is less appealing right now to us as it would have been maybe before the pandemic. After I listened to that piece, I thought to myself, the next piece I will be writing will be with a lot of changes, quite fast. And I did that because it was just to reprogram my mind, how I organize time, and how I create the experience of time for the listener. Some period of time passed and now I’m interested in this slowness of time again.
FJO: I’d be remiss not to talk with you a little bit about the new recording that just came out on Cantaloupe. That piece directly takes on environmental concerns, perhaps more directly than any of your earlier pieces. And I’m wondering, since we described music as being this very imprecise way to communicate specific thoughts, what you hope to attain with listeners in terms of them understanding the perils of the world that we’re in now and the real sort of sense of emergency of the situation ecologically of this planet and how your music is a response to that.
ZM: Yeah, once again, in this piece, Hadal Zone, I’m not giving a direct message or direct narrative of what I am concerned about. The title of the piece comes from the deepest zone of the ocean. Scientists divide the ocean into five different zones and each of them has a particular name. Hadal Zone is the very, very bottom; it’s like deep trenches within the ocean floor. I want people to think of those places that are not visible to us and what we have done to them through pollution and through everything that we did wrong for our planet and for the climate that is changing. I want to direct that gaze, but I want to direct it through the experience. So by allowing the listeners to descend from the surface of the ocean to the very, very depth, and to give them that experience of almost nothingness at the bottom, that deep and mysterious place, then after having that experience, I want them to think about it and to reconsider all their actions. Once again, it’s rather through the experience than through words or through direct messages and saying do something about it. But yes, of course, do something about it would be the message.
FJO: Thank you for so much of your time and for this fascinating conversation. I’m very eager to hear what comes next.
ZM: I’m working on a piece for a female voice and orchestra, and it’s a cycle of songs about 25 minutes long, maybe even half an hour, and it will have a text. Yes, I know, it’s quite unusual for me, but I must say I’m enjoying working with it, although I have mixed feelings about how I feel about text. But I will insert some vowel singing without text because I can’t go without it. But it’s this text by this very, very old female poet from more than 4,000 years ago called Enheduanna. So it’s Sumerian. She was a priestess and a poetess. Those texts are newly translated into English language, so I’m using English language and some Sumerian too, which will be an imaginary language, so we will see how that goes. It’s fascinating how the poetry that was composed such a long time ago still contains the same subject matters that are very much today’s topics, like war and migration of people and environmental concerns and catastrophes and gender bending identities. It’s just incredible how all the issues remain the same over and over.
FJO: Well, that’s a great note to end on.
